Dr Margaret White

Dr Margaret White, who has died aged 93, was a Croydon GP who became a
prominent campaigner against abortion and euthanasia, and was possibly the
only person ever to have left the historian Dr David Starkey lost for words.

Dr Margaret White

6:37PM BST 02 May 2013

Her book on abortion, Two Million Silent Killings, published in 1986, was described by the then Bishop of Norwich, Maurice Wood, as a “compassionate and hard-hitting book that is the most robust and loving defence of the unborn child that I have read”. Following the introduction of the Abortion Act, she took part in numerous television and radio debates and spoke at conferences around the world.

Her confrontation with Dr Starkey took place in 1997 during an episode of Radio 4’s The Moral Maze, in which she appeared as a witness for the moral case against abortion. When the historian told Margaret White that her nice motherly voice did not stop him concluding she was a hypocrite, she replied placidly: “I don’t mind; from some people it’s an honour to be abused.” When he then launched into a familiar tirade against Roman Catholicism, she stopped him dead to inform him that she was not a Catholic. Her beliefs, she said, arose from her medical training and her promise, in her Hippocratic Oath, not to kill. Starkey’s only recourse was to wonder, lamely, why women who suffer miscarriages do not hold Requiem Masses.

She was born Margaret Hunt at Whitby, North Yorkshire, on May 18 1919 and qualified in Medicine at Sheffield Medical School. In 1944 she married Tommy White, a fellow doctor, and they moved to Lowestoft, where she became Assistant Medical Officer of Health and established the country’s first free local authority family planning clinic. After the end of the war, her husband was posted as a medical officer to Vienna and she became a sort of voluntary “agony aunt” for wives and staff of the Allied Commission in Austria.

Back in Britain, the Whites settled in Croydon, where Margaret served as an Assistant Medical Officer of Health for 12 years before going into general practice in partnership with her husband. There, among other things, she established a clinic for young bed-wetters, pioneering a treatment that achieved success rates of up to 99 per cent; served as a voluntary consultant to the Marriage Guidance Council (now Relate); and organised volunteers to go into schools and talk to children about sex and personal relationships.

A practising Anglican, Margaret White also served as central vice-president of the Mothers’ Union and went on to chair the Family Welfare Committee of the Order of Christian Unity, producing a booklet for teenagers on sex and relationships called Real Questions, Real Answers.

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From 1962 to 1988 she served as a JP. Later she was elected to the General Medical Council, serving on their disciplinary committee, and was also elected a member of General Synod of the Church of England.

An active voluntary member of SPUC (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children), Margaret White served as vice-president after its inception in 1967 and began travelling the world giving talks. In 1971 she was one of the founders of Heartbeat International, the American pregnancy care association. In 1983 she addressed a “Call to Humanity” rally of 80,000 in Hyde Park to commemorate two million children “killed” under the Abortion Act.

In 1988, after the birth of a granddaughter, Anna, who had Down’s syndrome, she founded the Anna Fund, and with her daughter Elizabeth, Anna’s mother, set up the Lejeune Clinic, at St John and Elizabeth Hospital in Islington, where people with Down’s syndrome are offered medical examinations, blood tests, developmental tests and speech therapy.

A talented painter, Margaret White held exhibitions of her work to raise money for the clinic. Viewings were held at receptions hosted at the House of Lords.

Margaret White’s husband died in 2007. She is survived by their son and two daughters.